210 MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW
ered a new technology with the potential to change the world forever. Weather modification was the control of nature made easytechnology for the people. What Schaefer had done looked so
simple, it seemed anyone could do it. Consider the story of an
Arizona rancher who after reading about Schaefer's discovery in
Life magazine in 1946, took off in a plane of his own to cloud-seed
over his drought-stricken property. And he succeeded, not just in
making snow but in making history: he too was written up in Life.3
Weather modification had stunning cultural resonance. It was a
technology that everyone could support; for after all, as the saying
goes, everybody talks about the weather. Finally, somebody was
doing something about it.
Schaefer's discovery was far too important to be left only in the
hands of G.E. and the occasional rancher. Before long the military
embarked on weather modification research with the hope of adding it to its Cold War arsenal. Nor did the prospect of weather
control escape the eager eyes of American business. Everything in
America had a price tag, and now even the weather seemed to be
entering into the realm of markets and commodities as weather
companies - fifteen in all by 1965-sprung up to capitalize on the
bold new technology. The scope of that technology was wide
indeed, promising to make rain and snow, and to put an end to
lightning, fog, and hail. By 1952 it was estimated that cloud seeding
was taking place over almost 300 million acres of land, an area
almost three times the size of California.4
It had long been said that rain falls on the just and unjust, the rich
and the poor alike. But weather modification threatened to destroy
that truism. No longer would all humanity be equal before the
forces of nature. Weather modification offered science, the state,
and business a chance to appropriate nature in the most literal way,
to control sun and rain and clouds however they wished. It only
remained to be seen who the winners and losers would be in this
grandest of plans to dominate the natural world. This is the story of
what happened when weather modification came to south central
Pennsylvania.
I
Fulton County is an almost perfect parallelogram of 278,000 acres
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